> They want to kill all of it, but they can't just do it without a pr hit.

Gogle can do whatever they want to qpython and termux, 99% of the population will not care at all

Termux is no longer available via Play store as they refuse to acknowledge the way is via Java user space for specific official APIs.

> We can already run almost all Linux apps via other solutions

with Rooting.

"Docker on Android "

https://gist.github.com/FreddieOliveira/efe850df7ff3951cb62d...

>No, I don't trust Google neither other monopolies.

If it's any conciliation neither does the US government. We are in for a ma-bel shakeup of the market. You know, the one that let internet running to your house happen.

I'm inclined to suggest walking directly into their trap, gradually developing all the missing apps of a mobile-linux phone and then introducing a wine-like layer that emulates their trap on Linux mobile..

>They need to ve rebuilt with our "library"

Doesn't termux already require all its packages to be compiled against android NDKs?

No, there underneath is a migration plan being implemented...legacy Android will run sand boxed Linux apps to match Fuchsia offerings....first OEM Fuchsia device is 2028.

You're not wrong, if Google adds proper input methods support to Wayland (like on ChromeOS) apps will have to adapt. Or stick to the main toolkits (GTK and qt6) where Google provides IME modules.

IME on Wayland sucks right now outside of ChromeOS.

no you are not running Linux with those, if so, people would not be so excited about pKVM, or Samsung's Linux on DEX

this is based on pKVM, and should bring rootful VMs on unrooted devices

bro is paranoid

I don’t actually read it this way for what it’s worth. I agree with you that they are unifying in someways for sure but I don’t read it as the death of their desktop OS for even a moment.

I haven't seen any updates than those first screenshots, almost making me wonder if this is real. I do a search every few months to see if someone created a tool that allows anyone to run Windows/Linux on Android. Nope. Because I really want to do something really meaningful on my Galaxy Tab other than just watching YouTube or web browsing.

> Our phones might be our next Desktops/Laptops/main personal computing device

This is already reality with GNU/Linux phones: https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/

Apple hardware (M2 onward) includes hardware support for the nested virtualization used by pKVM.

I wonder what's happening to Fuchsia, if anything at all.

Yes. They are clearly moving in that direction.

I hope though, that they "backport" this new core to existing devices too. Will be a disaster to make so many machines obsolete.

And to ChromeOS Flex too. Definitely.

This is bringing the ChromeOS version of containers which are completely isolated from the outside OS - they have their own mounted storaage. You can mount in some folders to share data, but that's it. You DO have sudo though.

I bet it's going to be the same here.

I agree. Permissioning is going to be a huge problem, given that I rather doubt that google is going to allow anyone to "sudo".

If you work at any standard tech company, prepare for a plethora of abuse and bot cracking on Android, just like web

Desktop mode is the main one I can think of. Set your phone on your desk, plugin in USB-C cable, now you can run whatever "real" app you need under Linux while still only owning/maintaining/syncing a single device.

DeX is pretty popular for this on Samsung devices (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8RGMF2m3fA), but a native-Android desktop mode is slowly coming together.

Pixel 8+ supports USB-c DisplayPort Alt mode output to desktop monitor, i.e. you can have the full desktop keyboard, mouse and video experience.

I don't have a very small laptop, but I do have a tablet with a keyboard cover. Although the keyboard is hideous, absolutely hideous (Samsung, it is also Swedish layout fml), it is still a keyboard. With termux I can do basically all local and remote tasks I need, plus I can read pdfs nicely on the tablet, take notes with the stylus etc.

> the restricted nature of the small screen

Android is not restricted to small screens. With modern responsive UI designs one can address any screen size with a little extra effort. Ofcourse current Android apps are typically designed for small screens / touch (small screens make little sense for complex mouse or keyboard oriented UI's such as Blender or DAW's or IDE's etc.).

Conceptually Android offers a convoluted way to package linux for mass-market devices (with the objective, among others, to lock-down various "dangerous" functionalities etc.). While purist hackers will cringe, if its a means for open source linux apps to reach much wider audiences thats a good thing. It depends on what other small print gets associated with it :p

It can, on ChromeOS it's a fully featured Debian VM with seamless Wayland, VirGL and USB passtrough.

Effortlessly hosting home assistant in a podman on my old android would be awesome.

I think in ChromeOS you can run Linux (sort of like WSL2 in Windows). I don't think one can run Linux apps directly in ChromeOS. One can run Android apps directly in ChromeOS though.

My smartphone (Librem 5) already runs Linux apps, because it runs GNU/Linux.

My long running processes in termux runs just fine.

Yes in general (though security remains a tradeoff), but this is a completely different "let": it is "they are providing a solution that lets etc".

Is it any better if it's Apple or Microsoft, and it's malware stealing your data, being a part of a botnet, and infecting other users?

You might be interested in AIDE which has been around for ages

https://www.android-ide.com/

>> I'm not sure why I would want a local terminal (or a VM) on my phone... Sure, it runs Linux, but at the end of the day, it's a phone.

It is a pocket-sized portable computer that can also make phone calls.

You might not want to use it for general purpose computing tasks, but I do.

With Termux I can SSH into other machines, compile code, build web pages, and a variety of other things. It's not perfect, but it works for a lot of stuff.

I would love to have a fully-featured desktop convergence solution so I could plug in a keyboard, mouse, and monitor and have a full desktop environment. Android kind of works, but it's really clunky and some apps don't handle it very well.

I totally see this as a move to replace ChromeOS with Android. Why? It's all about the apps. Practically no one is building applications for ChromeOS, whereas Android has millions of apps. That's why they added the ability to run Android apps on ChromeOS and deprecated Chrome apps.

ChromeOS also has relatively low adoption compared to Android so it would simplify and consolidate the engineering and support efforts and costs.

At the end of the day, it's a general purpose pocket computer with phone capabilities.

But I can see that if all you ever ran on your "smartphones" was Android or iOS, then you may think about them as merely appliances.

I run a simple python server on a directory of html files, these are generated whenever I save something in emacs on my laptop (and get synced by mgit).

I sometimes use ssh to log into my laptop from another room on my phone to check something.

you might not use these things, but some of us like our computers to serve us, not the other way round.

Change in launch target.

> The code change, which hasn’t been merged yet, removes the entire Ferrochrome launcher app from AOSP. Google’s reason for removing this app is that it doesn’t plan to ship it or maintain its code. It seems that Google is shifting towards using the Linux-based Debian distro instead of Chrome OS as its testbed for AVF development.

Schrodinger's product

Waydroid already exists.

> more

Well, not really - not more -, because we have mobile devices that are born with Android and installing a Desktop Linux on them would be a hassle of doubtful results, and we have Desktop Linux applications that are missed in the Android software availability...

Both ways are sought: running Linux applications on Android and running Android applications on Linux and elsewhere.

I'm quite sad about the death of WSA

It's clearly a ChromeOS support feature. Most likely nothing that would relate to your phones.

How do you run your linux apps on your iPhone?

Their own Pixel phones have unlocked bootloaders by default, in fact, it's very user friendly to put another OS on them, like Graphene. I can only recommend.

> Almost nobody uses those features

...at the moment - as soon as we can build full mobile applications through something different than the SDK/NDK, development could surge, and the software supply with mobile environments in mind could also significantly pass through this alternative way.

Why wouldn't it be possible now? I've been carrying a portable Linux desktop OS in my pocket for years. There's no WebUSB screen sharing solution that I'm aware of, but it's just a matter of writing one if that's what you wish to use.

I don't think that'd be very useful on an ARM based android device. But they could release an ARM version of steam eventually.

Android devices with decent x86 emulation being released would be the ideal way to have that setup. Hopefully Qualcomm doesn't gate that feature to windows laptops.

If you want to run Windows games on Android, Winlator already does a lot of work for you (packaging Wine+Box86/Box64). My phone isn't exactly a powerhouse so the most impressive game I've been able to play with has been Oblivion so far.

What doesn't help is that the ARM GPUs in most phones don't work like the GPUs on desktop. Their I/O model is different, so you can't just take desktop shaders, transpile them, and run them on mobile without losing a boatload of performance. Maybe the desktop-ish chips will work for that, but I wouldn't hold my breath at the moment.

Well there is a steam client for Android already. They could extend that to an app store and sell mobile games there too, maybe even getting developers of pc games to port their games to mobile platforms?

This seems to run a VM rather than natively supporting linux syscalls. So termux will be more performant with its natively compiled binaries than this solution.

> Why not just open up Android ... root

Security. Many people want to run critical applications on their handhelds, and the policy is to err on the side of safety.

(In "better safe than sorry", that is a different kind of sorry - I spoke only yesterday with a user that got locked out of the device completely because of a small accident.)

The only thing Linux on Android is the Linux kernel.

> Android is fundamentally Linux.

I thought that Android is mostly Java (that happens to run on a Linux kernel but might be anything as far as the specs are concerned).

They'll never go that route because Google wants full control on your device. But yeah fundamentally, there's no technical reason why Android couldn't be a normal Linux distribution.

I've run Linux command line tools and GUI tools using Termux and a random X11 app. . It already works, just not with stuff requiring root permissions (no wireshark etc.). Apps like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.ula do it through VNC instead.

What I found to be the most limiting factor isn't the OS, but the tiny screen and the lack of good input methods.

Funnily enough, Samsung ran trials where their Dex mode provided a full Linux GUI when plugged into a monitor/USB dock, but that got killed off. Now Dex is back to being an Android desktop environment again. On the plus side, Dex now also works on tablets without being docked, so I guess that was worth it for me.

GrapheneOS + AVF/pKVM on Pixel Tablet looks promising.

Hopefully the next Pixel Tablet includes an optional wired keyboard.

iPad Pro had VMs in 2022, sadly removed by Apple.

You can count me too.

Of course you use applications on some systems also according to the trust that you have towards said systems. There are still applications that could be nice to have running on Android - it is a possibility.

Plus: you know, you could use Android on an airgapped device... Many of mine are.

Heard that Google? Stop immediately.